Adam Culp of the South Florida PHP Users Group tipped me off to an event they have coming up in just a couple weeks for their December meeting. On December 14th, they’re welcoming Rasmus Lerdorf to speak on “PHP in 2011.” Rasmus , the inventor of PHP, will talk to us and give his perspective […]

I love APIs. A well-defined API can make short work of a complex problem. It’s even more fun when you find a cool API with a great wrapper to make it simple to use. That’s what I found when I started playing with Amazon’s Simple Email Service; a tool that was easy to work with, solved a problem I needed solved, and had a simple to use PHP wrapper.

Full-text search with SQLite is so ridiculously easy to implement, there are only two valid reasons you haven’t done it yet. The first is you don’t need the full-text capability, and the second is you didn’t know it could be done. Here are the steps in full: Ensure full-text search is enabled (see below) Create […]

Most people are familiar with Google Maps. You type in an address, and you are given a map that shows you the exact location of your query. Part of the process that goes on behind the scenes is geocoding, which takes a physical address and maps it to a set of longitude and latitude coordinates. […]

php|architect announces our latest project, Elephpant Ware: Wearable art for PHP developers.

Have you ever wanted to add location-aware content to your web applications? Would you believe me if I told you it was dead easy, and you could be up and running in about 10 minutes? The first thing you want to do is use someone else’s work. Geolocation is a solved problem; there’s no need […]

Recently, I attended a panel of local business executives discussing “the Cloud”. Overall, it was an interesting discussion. Since they all managed what we would consider “Enterprise Scale” operations, it was a different viewpoint for me as I spend much of my time talking to smaller scale operations or start-ups. As the discussion played out, […]

Yet again, it’s that time of year. Later today we have the kick off of the seventh ZendCon (officially called the Zend PHP Conference). This year I’m hitting the event under the php|architect banner as press. It will be my job to cover the good, the bad, the news, the chaos, and generally the things […]

I’ve heard a lot of people compare PHP to a Swiss Army Knife. You know the ones, 5 blades, a corkscrew, a saw…and the obligatory toothpick that you will lose so you might as well take it out now and just throw it away. Why anyone would consider PHP to be like this is beyond me.

Even successful software often fails miserably.